


Gainful Employment

by Truth



Category: Shaun of the Dead
Genre: Gen, Spoilers, Zombies, canon undeath
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-02-11
Updated: 2005-02-11
Packaged: 2017-10-14 06:41:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/146460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Truth/pseuds/Truth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It's time for Ed to find a job."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gainful Employment

“It’s time for Ed to find a job.”

Shaun continued to stare blankly at the television for a long minute. “Yeah, Pat. I see what you mean.”

There was a moment of frozen silence, and Shaun’s somewhat stunted instinct for self-preservation kicked in with a vengeance, presenting him with the following facts:

1\. Patrick was dead.  
2\. Ed was dead too. Sort of. Mostly.  
3\. If Patrick was dead, he wasn’t telling Shaun that Ed needed to shift it off the couch and find work. … well, probably not. He hoped.  
4\. Liz had been here a minute ago.  
5\. Liz was **not** dead.  
6\. … he’d just called Liz, the love of his life, Patrick.

Ripping his attention away from the riveting bit on the telly showing how a young cellist had managed to fool three experts into thinking she was an experienced House/Trance dj, he looked up to find Liz staring down at him, wearing expression number three.

Expression three was always bad news and usually appeared only as prelude to Shaun having to sleep on the couch for a few days.

“Look, Liz, Ed is _dead_.” Shaun knew he’d made a fatal error as expression three abruptly shifted to expression six. “I mean, not _buried_ dead, but not exactly someone you’d want trying to sell you real estate. Funeral plots, maybe….”

“Shaun!” Liz broke into his ramblings with a furious shout. “I _know_ that Ed is dead, I was _there_ , remember? I was also there when you ran those wires out to the shed so that you could still play games with your best mate, even though he’s a dead cannibal!”

“… well, not technically a cannibal, because the girl on that science show said that they’re a new form of life al… together….” Shaun shut up on his own that time. Liz could be extremely frightening when she wanted to be. Now appeared to be one of those times.

“Between the butcher’s bill, the extra electric, that gag you bought him because you wanted to take him for _walks_ , and don’t tell me that you didn’t just want to frighten that little brat down the street by taking Ed for a walk and letting him scratch at the garden gate, Ed is just as expensive dead as he was alive!” Liz paused to take a deep breath, face flushed as she leaned over Shaun. “Between the two of us, we have enough to buy a nicer house, take a nice holiday every six months and live, if not in luxury, in comfort. If Ed is going to sponge off us for the rest of his life….”

“Death,” Shaun corrected helpfully, and then wished that he hadn’t.

“Shaun,” her voice was calm now, and Shaun actually cringed. “I am not going to have my chances for a nicer house and two holidays abroad a year ruined because of your dead best mate.”

“Yes, Liz.” Capitulation brought expression three back, and Shaun was actually relieved to see it.

“If you want to keep Ed in the shed, you’re going to have to find him a job.” Liz delivered her ultimatum, chin up and prepared for battle.

“Yes, Liz. I see your point.” There was a brief pause as even expression three disappeared. Smiling, Shaun turned his attention back to the telly. “I’ll take a look at what’s available first thing tomorrow.”

“SHAUN!”

That brought him up off the couch, arms flailing, grabbing for the cricket bat that he kept beneath the coffee table. Liz watched him leap about, face set. When he finally calmed down enough to realize that the living dead weren’t shambling anywhere in their immediate vicinity, she folded her arms and glared at him.

“Not tomorrow. Today. I’ve copied out the listings from the paper – the places that’re looking for ‘life-impaired resources’. Give Ed a wash, put some decent clothes on him, find his leash and take him ‘round.”

Shaun opened his mouth to protest.

“Now!”

An hour later, lazy Saturday afternoon at an end, Shaun found himself staring out a large, plate glass window as the hiring manager looked at Ed’s paperwork. On the other side of the glass, two floors below, a fenced in yard held about fifteen dead people, divided into groups of three. The first group was apparently learning how to stack boxes, coaxed on by what looked like a side of mutton while two men with tasers concentrated on keeping any stragglers from leaving the work area. The second group were learning how to mop, and the third seemed to be slowly figuring out how to load a truck.

“We’ve currently got a couple of openings down at the waste plant,” the manager offered brightly, pulling Shaun’s attention away from the window. “It’s easy work. The wages are a pittance, really, but we’ll feed him and sluice him down at the end of the day.”

“That sounds sort of… undignified,” Shaun commented, casting an uneasy glance at Ed.

Ed was busily chewing on the inside of his gag, staring, transfixed, at the laser pointer that the manager had been fiddling with.

“Well, he _is_ dead,” the manager pointed out patiently. “There aren’t many white collar jobs that require shambling and an ability to go, ‘OoooohhooooOOoohhHHh’ as key points on a resume.”

“There’s no call to be rude.” Shaun flung an arm around Ed and glared at the manager, only to snatch his arm hastily backward as this movement caught Ed’s total, and somewhat hungry, attention.

“If you don’t like the waste plant option, there’s always sluicing down the floors at the slaughterhouse. They seem to be easier to handle around dead meat, and we keep them out of the parts of the building where they and the animals will come into contact.” The manager offered.

“After that mess at the stockyards?” It’d been in the news for weeks. “I should think so.”

There was a dull thump against the glass and all three men turned to glance at the window.

“Birds,” the manager sighed. “If not the stockyards, we could try basic janitorial. It pays a little more, but he’ll have to be extensively trained first. No pay for several weeks.”

“Look, Mr….” Shaun glanced at the name plate on the desk, “Muribun. Isn’t there anything with a little more… personality to it?”

“Well, we do have an opening in the entertainment industry, but I hesitate to offer it….”

Shaun snatched the folder from his hands and scanned the description. “We’ll take it.”

The executive parking lot was a bit of a shambles. One of the fences was down and some lunatic was driving a truck through the lanes with a fine disregard for the traffic laws or any basic safety. It swerved to miss someone standing in the middle of one of the lanes and nearly plowed down a small crowd that had gathered beside the hole in the fence and were attempting to clumsily repair it with a lattice of mop handles supported by wooden boxes.

Shaun extricated the car from the fracas without too much trouble, although he did have to move to the side to allow the police cars to pass him as they moved to pursue the truck through the parking lot. “You’ll love your new job, Ed.” His smile was almost relieved. “And think, if you make good tips, maybe we can move you into a closet when we buy a bigger home.”

“Mmgmgmmththgrrrr,” Ed responded, still chewing busily on his gag.

Liz’s response to the news, however, could best be described as a sort of shocked horror. She stared from Shaun to Ed and from Ed back to Shaun, skipping out of the way of Ed’s attempt to trip her up from where he sat on the floor, chained to the radiator. “He’s going to be a _what_!?”

“Well, it’s a legal thing, really,” Shaun told her, looking over the top of the opened cupboard at her as he foraged for a snack. “I mean, there’s a law against putting people in cages.”

“ _People_ , yes. And don’t look at me like that, Shaun. Ed may be your best mate, but he’s not ‘people’ anymore.” Liz stared at him. “You’re going to let them put him in a cage?”

“Well, you can’t very well have dead people wandering loose through a club,” Shaun pointed out logically. “It’s against the health laws.”

“Shaun!”

“Look, the description was ‘cage dancer’,” Shaun protested hastily. “The hiring bloke said that all he’d really have to do was wander back and forth and go ‘OoooOoOOhHhh’ and the club managers will be happy. They have to pay him a full wage as ‘entertainment’ and he gets free drinks, so we all win.”

“Probably at ‘animal act’ wages,” Liz muttered. “He doesn’t drink anymore anyway, unless it’s blood.”

“’s the principal of the thing,” Shaun told her, affronted. “Anyway, I thought you’d be happy. He adds to the atmosphere of this gothy club place, we get a paycheck to take care of his costs, and all’s well that ends well, right?”

“… you’re going to ask me to let him live in the closet now, aren’t you?”

“Please? He doesn’t try to claw through the door anymore of nights. Much. And they’ll wash him at the end of every night, so there won’t be a much of a smell. Plus I’ll get some of those little air scenty things.” Shaun closed the cupboard and gave her a pleading look.

Liz sighed, leaning forward to give him a kiss. “I’ll think about it.”

“You’re the best, Liz.” Shaun kissed her back, smiling brightly.

“Mmmmthgrrrrr.”

“Ed thinks so too.”

“… Ed is also attempting to eat the curtains.” Liz pointed out, looking over Shaun’s shoulder.

“No great loss,” Shaun told her, leaning forward for another kiss. “They were Patrick’s idea anyway.”

“Grrrrrmmmm!”


End file.
